The Elite Sport Relevance Index: a five-dimensional framework for understanding value creation in elite sport

Elite sport has traditionally derived its legitimacy from competitive success and international prestige. However, growing expectations concerning social responsibility, sustainability, economic accountability, and emotional engagement increasingly challenge this performance-centric rationale. Sport management research has addressed these developments across disparate strands, but lacks an integrative framework that captures elite sport relevance as a multidimensional and dynamic process of value creation. This article introduces the Elite Sport Relevance Index (ESRI), a conceptual framework comprising five interrelated dimensions: Performance, People, Planet, Profit, and Passion. Building on the Triple Bottom Line and sport-specific value frameworks, the ESRI conceptualizes elite sport as a value-creating system operating across sporting, social, environmental, economic, and cultural-emotional domains. A focused synthesis of sport management literature, complemented by illustrative examples from elite sport practice, explicates each dimension and theorizes their interaction through institutional logics. The ESRI contributes a diagnostic and deliberative framework that makes complementarities, tensions, structural conflicts, and power-laden prioritizations visible. It positions leadership and governance as mediating but bounded mechanisms through which value claims are translated into material practices, while recognizing that not all contradictions can be resolved organizationally.